


A Great Silence

by MercuryGray



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Aftermath, Conversations, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Missing Scene, Original Character(s), World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-17
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-15 08:05:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11226792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: After the battle, in the silence, there is time to think. But Diana's mind is not silent.





	A Great Silence

After the plane explodes, there is a great silence. Clouds move. Men look about. The guns lie still.

 

But in Diana's heart, there is a thin, keening wail.

 

Death is a stranger to Themyscira. The Amazons are blessed with lives so long they might as well be immortal, and before Antiope, Diana did not know what it was like to lose a loved one. Horses, dogs, chickens for the pot - these things die in their season, but Amazons? Diana knew of no such loss like this.

 

While the rest of her mother's warriors took Steve back to the palace, Diana knelt on the beach with her aunt's body in her arms, letting her go only when Antiope’s lover knelt beside her and clasped the corpse close.

 

The sound Menalippe made is the sound Diana's heart is making now.

 

She can feel the lightning crackling in her veins, her heart wild with renewed purpose and strength, the Godkiller finally made manifest - but still the wailing is there, in the corners of her chest, at the edges of the dark, knowing he will not come back out of the sky.

 

There is debris to move, fires to extinguish - but none of these tasks fall to Diana. Charlie and Sami and Chief take her away from the aerodrome, back to the American supply depot to wait for a ship back to England. Hearing all the voices that sound so much like his does not seem to help the wailing.

 

"Cup of tea?" 

 

Diana looks up from her thoughts, still up in the clouds in an airplane that will never return. The woman in front of her is wearing a rumpled uniform that's seen the inside of far too many washtubs and a patient expression, a lock of hair escaping her cap, and is holding a battered tin cup filled with a dark liquid. (Etta tried to put her on to tea, in London, but it didn't take. Steve tried coffee and didn't fare any better.) It's steaming in the mid-morning air as the sun tries its hardest to shine. The woman looks like she could use the stimulant herself, her cheeks gaunt and her eyes tired, but the offer is genuine - a gesture of kindness she knows will fall far short of what's required. 

 

She smiles, and takes the cup, and the woman smiles, too, her duty, for the moment, done. She stands by and waits while Diana raises the cup to her lips. The tea is sweet, and dark, what Charlie and Etta might call  _ a proper cuppa _ , a different kind of lightning jumping down her throat, and there is a kind of comfort in it as the warmth goes down into her stomach. 

 

"Mind if I sit?" the woman asks, and Diana shakes her head, moving over on her bench so her new friend can sit down, sighing in contentment. (Her boots are caked with mud. How long has she been standing in this road this morning with her cups of tea?) "Irene," she offers, meeting Diana's gaze with a friendly smile. Irene, Diana repeats it in her head, the name familiar to her. Eirene. Ειρηνη. 

 

"Diana." 

 

She was amazed, as she walked around London with Steve and Etta, at how different the women seemed from the women of her childhood home, but here in France, they've been different, brighter, somehow, sharpened by the war. There were no Amazons in the streets of London, but there are some here - the doctor bustling through her ward in her white surgical coat, the matron arguing with an area commander about where the truck loaded with supplies can go, the nurses moving casualties out of the ambulances and the drivers checking their watches and their engines, ready to spring off again down terrible, jolting roads for another load. And this woman, too, this Irene, with her worn hands and her rumpled uniform and her cup of tea. She has no sword, no bow, but there is some kind of warrior in her, to stand here by this roadside, as tired as she is, and smile, and offer hope to men who have none.

 

"They're saying that Captain Trevor flew an airplane full of explosives off," she says, neither asking for an answer nor demanding a response.

 

Diana says nothing, her silence an agreement, and sips her tea, tears pricking at her eyes again. What is the use of a loving heart when it comes with so much pain? 

 

“Shame,” Irene muses. “I met him a few times,” she offers. “Captain Trevor. Most of the flyboys wouldn’t give you the time of day, but he always said thank you, and please. He was a real gentleman.” 

 

Diana doesn’t know whether or not to nod her assent; he was all those things she says, and more - kind and patient, brave and reckless. She is staring at her tea and all she can see are his eyes, his smile, the way his hands curled around hers as he gave her his father’s watch. What stories she could tell in this silence! Her mother always knew when she was lying when she didn’t speak, but she has no words just now. Only the wailing.

 

"My ...friend got the telegram about her fiance in the middle of a shift,” her companion says, tentative, as if she’s sharing something she shouldn’t. “Shoved it in her pocket and had to wait until after she was done with work to have her cry.” 

 

_ My friend _ , she says, and Diana remembers stories her tutors told her with shifting eyes,  _ I had a friend once who _ , cautionary tales from their own lives hidden behind nameless women. Irene’s face is pinched and sad, as though she, too, is trying not to cry. Diana does not need a lasso to know what the truth in this story is. She meets Irene’s eye, holding her gaze. There are no secrets here between them. “What was it like?”

 

“Like I'd never be whole again.” 

 

“When does it stop?” 

 

“It doesn't.” The words sink between them like a stone. Her eyes are dark, edges bright with unspent tears.. “But it feels better while I'm working.”  _ Working _ . Diana wonders at the word. What is it she is meant to work at, now that Ares is gone?  _ What do people do, when there is peace? Eat breakfast, read the paper. Get married. _ But Irene is going on. “Someone will smile, thank me for the drink, and it feels...like I'm fighting it, the sadness. And if I don’t fight it, who will?” She nudged a pebble in the street with her shoe, considering her words. “They’re saying that it was a woman who walked out onto that airfield and tore it up,” she offered. “That she caused a storm and did things no one should be able to do. Threw tanks. Caught lightning in her bare hands. Flew.” Diana looks up. Irene is smiling now, the look of a woman who also already knows the truth. “I’d shake her hand, if I could. I couldn’t do what she did - but I’m glad she did it. A woman’s just what this war needed. What this  _ world _ needs.”

 

She smiles, lays her hand on Diana’s arm to give it a companionable squeeze, and the Amazon feels something like hope again. Her hands are dirty, nails cut short and smudged with grime. But then, Diana’s hands look just as dirty, too.  _ We have  _ _ both _ _ been working,  _ she thinks to herself. When she was young she’d often sneak away from her lessons with the healers and the holy women, going to watch Antiope and Menalippe on the training ground. It’s taken a war to teach her there is value, too, in cups of tea, in friendly, caring silence. 

 

_ I couldn’t do what she did. And if I don’t fight this, who will? _

_I can save today, but you can save the world._

And then, she realizes, the wailing has stopped. She straightens up and smiles at the other woman. “You have a good name, Irene,” she says, meeting her companion’s eye and holding out her hand in the gesture of friendship and sisterhood. “It means peace."  _ We have need of that now more than ever.  _

 

_ Thank you for giving mine back to me. _

 

**Author's Note:**

> I know there's some debate about the exact nature of Menalippe's 'sisterhood' with Antiope and Hippolyta and whether it's a familial relationship or the more general battle-sisterhood between all Amazons. I'm choosing to work here with the way I perceived it in the movie, that between Menalippe and Antiope there was a romantic relationship and not a familial one.
> 
> One of my issues with Wonder Woman was how few women showed up in the modern part of the film. World War One is one of my favorite historic periods *because* there are so many women doing things they've never done before on and near battlefields, and I felt like Diana got shortchanged by not meeting any of them, so I've taken the liberty of adding one in. I've been intentionally vague about which organization Irene works for - it could be the YMCA, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, or any of a dozen other aid organizations operating (under mostly female direction and supervision) in France during the Great War. At the end of the film, we see Diana in the midst of cheering crowds in London with Etta, and that left me wondering - how does Diana Prince adjust or move into life in the modern world? My hope is that there are plenty more Irenes and Ettas waiting to welcome her in somewhere.


End file.
